Thursday, July 14, 2016

I grew up calling my midday meal "lunch" and my evening meal "supper." I knew that some people called their midday meal "dinner", and I recently realised that there is a good number of people that also call their evening meal "dinner." So where does that leave me? I have no idea what to say now!

Malaysia 2011

I've often observed that people can be quite emotionally involved in their use of language, and I have indeed met with people that are adamant that their terminology is correct. So I decided to check it out, and here is what I have consistently found: dinner is interchangeable. This is because the word doesn't refer to the time of day but the size of the meal you are eating. Whatever is your largest meal of the day, you would refer to that as dinner. If your largest meal is midday, then your evening meal would be supper because that is the name for a light evening meal. If your largest meal is in the evening, then your midday meal would be called lunch because that is the name for a light midday meal.

If this is the common convention on how these words are used, then apparently I grew up starving because I always had lunch and supper in my world, and apparently I never had a large meal! hehe :)The few sites I checked out also said that these tend to be regionally associated as well. For example, farming communities might have larger meals at the end of the day after all the work was done, and workers would be extra hungry. So it seems like there is no real need to say it one way or the other because whatever you use where you live is just fine.